Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
23 | Caroline White Sartoris |
In Flags in the Dust, Caroline White is the Memphis girl who met and married (Young) Bayard Sartoris when he was teaching flying lessons in that city. She is identified mainly by her "wild bronze swirling" hair (45), but she is also recognizably a modern woman: she has no proper ideas about "keeping house," at least according to Jenny (51), and the narrator refers to "the brittle daring of her speech and actions" (73). She and her newborn son died, perhaps of influenza, in 1918, while her husband was fighting overseas in World War I. |
|
55 | Caroline Bascomb Compson |
In The Sound and the Fury Caroline Compson is the sister of Maury Bascomb (Uncle Maury), the wife of Jason Compson III, and the mother of Quentin, Candace, Jason and Maury|Benjamin. She is probably also the daughter of the woman called "Damuddy" whose death is the earliest event (and loss) in Benjy and Quentin's memories. A bed-ridden neurotic and a hypochondriac, Caroline seems hopelessly preoccupied with herself. She is obsessed with the social standing of the Bascomb family and largely oblivious to the misery of her own. |
|
1516 | Captain Wyatt |
One of the Confederate officers who rides with J.E.B. Stuart in Flags in the Dust; it is on his horse that the captured Union Major is carried. (He does not seem to be related in any way to the Wyatt sisters who live next door to the Benbows in Jefferson.) |
|
766 | Captain Warren |
In the 1932 short story "Death Drag" Captain Warren is a well-to-do war veteran who has established himself comfortably in his home town; adults and children alike know him as "an ex-army flyer" who "was in the war" (185, 188). There is actually no clear evidence in the story that Warren's home town is Jefferson, and its likely that if he did live in Yoknapatawpha he would have been mentioned in Flags in the Dust (1929), with its focus on aviators and returning wounded veterans. |
|
2876 | Captain Studenmare |
In "A Courtship," Captain Studenmare is the owner of the steamboat that visits the Chickasaw plantation annually. He depends upon another man, David Hogganbeck, to pilot it. After he fires Hogganbeck for dereliction, he is forced to return to Natchez overland with his "steamboat slaves," the enslaved Negroes who do the physical work on board the ship (378). |
|
3457 | Captain Strutterbuck |
A patron at Reba's brothel in Memphis in The Mansion. Montgomery Ward Snopes says Strutterbuck "even got his name out a book" (86), but it's not clear what book Mink might be thinking of, and the money order he gives Miss Reba proves Strutterbuck's last name is real. Most of the rest of his story, however, rings false, including the military rank he claims and the stories he tells about his service in World War I. He is described as "about fifty," "tall, pretty big, with a kind of rousterbout's face" (83). He tries to cheat a prostitute named Thelma out of her money. |
|
2003 | Captain Spoomer |
According to the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots," Spoomer is a snob from a family of snobs who owes his rank to the influence of his uncle, a general. Spoomer's snobbery is displayed when he tells his dog not to eat the trash behind the enlisted men's mess hall: "You mustn't eat that stuff," he says; "That's for soldiers" (519). Spoomer also uses his rank to impress women; he has taken one from Sartoris before the story begins. |
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331 | Captain Bowen |
In "Raid" and again in The Unvanquished, Captain Bowen is in charge of the Union cavalry troop which Rosa, Bayard, and Ringo encounter on their way back home. Although he himself doesn't appear, one of his lieutenants says that the Captain mounted them with captured stock. |
|
2326 | Captain Bean |
The Memphis man whom the narrator of "Uncle Willy" identifies as "Captain Bean at the airport" refuses to teach Willy how to fly without a certificate from a doctor but is willing to teach Secretary, Willy's black driver - which seems to flaunt the rules of segregation (241). His title suggests he may be an ex-World War I aviator, like many other flyers in Faulkner's fictions, but that is conjecture. |
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3431 | Cap'm Jabbo |
The guard at Parchman Penitentiary who shoots Jake Barron in The Mansion is called "Cap'm Jabbo" by Mink (108). |
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51 | Candace Compson |
Speaking outside the pages of his art, Faulkner called Caddy Compson his "heart's darling," and The Sound and the Fury his attempt to draw her "picture." It's a very modern portrait, however, defined by her absence everywhere in the novel except in the minds of her three brothers, each of whom attempts to fill the absences at the center of his own life with what he tries to make her represent or (to use the term that is both there and absent in the novel's Shakespearean title) to 'signify.' On her own terms, Caddy almost too good to be believable. |
|
2043 | Calvin Coolidge |
Calvin Coolidge was the thirtieth President of the United States. He is mentioned peripherally in Sanctuary and The Town, but becomes a peripheral character in "Death Drag" when Ginsfarb bitterly describes the role Coolidge played in his own life, as the antagonist who "ruined" his former business and making him a barnstorming dare-devil to survive (192). |
|
750 | Calvin Burden II |
Colonel Sartoris' killing of two Northerners during Reconstruction is told four times in the fictions. The first time, in Flags in the Dust, Will Falls refers to them as "them two cyarpet-baggers" (23). They are given names in Light in August, where the same event is retold from Joanna Burden's perspective. The younger of these men is her half-brother, Calvin Burden II; Joanna calls him "a boy who had never even cast his first vote" (249). |
|
749 | Calvin Burden I |
Colonel Sartoris' killing of two Northerners during Reconstruction is told four times in the fictions. The first time, in Flags in the Dust, Will Falls refers to them as "them two cyarpet-baggers" (23). They are given names in Light in August, where the same event is retold from Joanna Burden's perspective. The oldest of these men is her grandfather, Calvin Burden I; he lost one of his arms fighting against slavery as "a member of a troop of partisan guerilla horse" in 1861 (244). |
|
330 | Calvin BookwrightBookright |
We can say for sure that this character lives in or near the Frenchman's Bend part of Yoknapatawpha, but otherwise our composite Bookwright|Bookright is based on interpretation. In The Town Cal Bookright is the father of the woman Zack Houston marries. In The Mansion Calvin Bookwright is a moonshiner: according to Hoke McCarron, the "stuff [he] used to make" tasted "jest like" Bushmill's, a well-known brand of Irish whiskey (190). In The Reivers "Uncle Cal Bookwright" makes moonshine whiskey that can be bought at Mack Winbush's for two dollars a gallon (12). |
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145 | Callina Beauchamp |
In Go Down, Moses, Callina, or Carolina, Beauchamp is the daughter of Tomey’s Turl and Tennie Beauchamp. She dies as an infant. |
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2526 | Cain |
In The Hamlet the store owner from whom Ab buys the milk separator is named Cain . (In the original version of this event, "Fool about a Horse" [1936], the man who owns the store is Ike McCaslin.) |
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2476 | C.L. Gambrell |
In "Monk," C.L. Gambrell is the warden at the penitentiary. He seems to be a fair, kind man in many respects. He makes Monk a "trusty" (trustee, 49), and Monk follows him with "doglike devotion" (49). However, he also displays a cruel streak when he goads Bill Terrel concerning his pardon. He shows his judgment to be even more questionable when he has an unnamed Negro cook "severely beaten" in an effort to extract information about his missing pistol. Monk later finds the pistol where the warden then "recalls having hid it himself" (53). |
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239 | Byron Snopes' Daughter |
Byron Snopes has four children - probably all illegitimate, legally - with a Jicarilla Apache in New Mexico. According to Charles Mallison's narrative in The Town, "the tallest was a girl though we never did know whether she was the oldest or just the tallest" (378); like her brothers, she is wearing overalls when she arrives in Jefferson. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.) |
|
227 | Byron Snopes |
Although Flem, Montgomery Ward, I.O. and Clarence are mentioned in Flags in the Dust, in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction Byron is the first Snopes whom Faulkner develops into a character. Many Snopeses are named for famous men or products in American culture (vide "Montgomery Ward"). 'Byron Societies' were bourgeois reading groups in the U.S. about the time Byron Snopes would have been born - there is even a "Byron Club" in Jefferson in The Town (325) - but it's hard to imagine Byron's parents (revealed in the Snopes trilogy to be I.O. |
|
3011 | Byron Bunch |
One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man. |
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3123 | Buzzard Egglestone |
Beroth Egglestone is a real man who served in the Civil War as a Union General. Afterwards he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains how he acquired the unflattering sobriquet that Requiem for a Nun uses to refer to him: "Buzzard" (87). |
|
3684 | Butch Lovemaiden |
Butch, the deputy sheriff who bullies Boon and Corrie in Parsham in The Reivers, says his last name is "Lovemaiden" (187). This could be true, though it's not impossible that he gives himself that name as another way to annoy Boon. He is described as being "almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge" (168) and "a bachelor" (190). Lucius says he smells of "sweat and whiskey" (170). |
|
1746 | Butch |
In "Dry September" Butch is "hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt" who abrasively advocates vigilante action against Will Mayes (169). He ends up joining the lynch mob. |
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2161 | Burringtons in New Hampshire |
According to Joanna in Light in August, many members of the Burrington family she descends from still live in New Hampshire, although she has only seen these relatives "perhaps three times in her life" (241). |
|
760 | Burrington, Cousin of Nathaniel Burden |
In Light in August it is this cousin of Nathaniel Burden who finds a bride in New Hampshire for him. Since the other New England relatives of the Burdens are named Burrington, we presume that's also this cousin's last name. |
|
1082 | Burgess Girl |
In The Sound and the Fury the Burgesses live near if not across the street from the Compsons. The little girl in the family comes home from school just as Caddy used to. She is used to Benjy "running along the fence" (53), and unafraid. When Benjy finds the gate unlocked one day after Caddy's wedding, he catches at this girl and "tries to say" (53) something to her - he himself cannot say what even to himself - but her father, assuming he intends to assault her, knocks him out with a fence picket. |
|
1975 | Burchett Children |
In "Hair" the Burchett's have "two or three more children" of their own, in addition to Susan Reed, the one they adopted (131). |
|
677 | Bundren, Mother of Anse |
In As I Lay Dying, Anse's mother is mentioned in passing by Doctor Peabody. As he climbs the steep slope up to the Bundren house, Peabody wonders "how his mother ever got up to birth him" (42). |
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3010 | Buford |
In Light in August, Deputy Buford discovers "traces of recent occupation" in the cabin beyond Joanna's house (290) and "reckons" that if there is anyone living in that place, they would be Negroes. |
|
71 | Buddy MacCallum |
The youngest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family is Buddy. He first appears in Flags in the Dust as a kind of foil to Bayard Sartoris: both have served in World War I - Buddy has a combat medal to show how well he fought - but Buddy is not a member of any 'lost generation.' He returns to Yoknapatawpha, resumes his place in the yeoman family (though he doesn't display the medal, in deference to his un-reconstructed ex-Confederate father who refuses to believe his son fought in a "Yankee" army, 342), and continues his life as a countryman and avid hunter. |
|
224 | Bucky Stevens |
In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61). |
|
948 | Buck Turpin |
Buck Turpin is probably a merchant or businessman in Jefferson. In The Sound and the Fury he owns the lot in which the traveling show that performs in town over the Easter weekend sets up its tent, being paid $10 for that. |
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2666 | Buck Thorpe |
The young man whom Bookwright shoots for seducing his seventeen-year-old daughter in "Tomorrow" was named "Jackson and Longstreet Fentry" for the first three years of his life (100). Born to a homeless poor-white woman given shelter by Jackson Fentry, he is raised by Fentry until age three, when he is reclaimed by his mother's family, the Thorpes. He grows up to be the ne'er do well Buck who appears in Frenchman's Bend "from nowhere," and is described as "a brawler, a gambler," a moonshiner and a cattle thief (90). |
|
427 | Buck Monaghan |
In Flags in the Dust the man "with an army pilot's wings on his breast" drinking with Bayard in the Chicago nightclub flew with the Sartoris twins in the British air corps during World War I (384). In the later short story "Ad Astra," set at the front during that war, Monaghan describes himself as "shanty Irish," because his late father made "a million dollars digging sewers in the ground" (414). He is also a former student at Yale. Monaghan seems uncomfortable with his complex social status, and there is "something of the crucified" about him after three years of war (414). |
|
327 | Buck Hipps |
Faulkner recounts or mentions the auction of the wild horses in Frenchman's Bend in four different texts. The auctioneer is a "Texas man," as the narrator of "Spotted Horses" repeatedly calls him (167), a "broad-hatted stranger" in "Centaur in Brass" (150), "that Texas feller" in The Town (35), and Buck Hipps in The Hamlet. His character is displayed in detail in that novel and "Spotted Horses." In both texts he is armed with an "ivory-handled pistol" - though he also carries "a box of gingersnaps" right next to the gun (167, 300). |
|
748 | Buck Connors II |
In The Town, Buck Connors II is the son of Marshal Buck Connors and friends with Chick Mallison. Chick remembers him as one of the group of boys who dared each other during the hunting party that takes place at Harrykin Creek. (The Marshal name is elsewhere spelled 'Conner,' but here both father and son are 'Connors.') |
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326 | Buck Conner|Connors |
A Jefferson town marshal who appears in several of the fictions, though as "Buck" in Flags in the Dust, as "Buck Conner" in "Centaur in Brass" and Light in August, and as "Buck Conners" in The Town. In the first novel he follows Miss Jenny's orders to get care of Young Bayard, giving up his own bed in the jail building to allow Sartoris to sleep off the effects of his fall and his drinking. Flem Snopes pays him a compliment of sorts in "Centaur": "Buck Conner'll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib" (159). |
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2900 | Bryan Gowrie |
In Intruder in the Dust Bryan is the third of Hub Gowrie's six sons, Bryan is the one who runs the "family farm which fed them all" (161). |
|
2861 | Bryan Ewell |
In "An Error in Chemistry" Bryan Ewell is a deputy sheriff whom the sheriff orders to guard Wesley Pritchel's house after Pritchel has locked himself in his room (122). (Bryan may be related to Walter Ewell, who appears in six other fictions, but there is no mention of any relationship.) |
|
1495 | Brother Moore |
In Flags in the Dust Moore is the member of the delegation from the Second Baptist Church who formally, and reluctantly, reads out to Old Bayard the amount of money Simon owes the church building fund. He is described as "a small ebon negro in sombre, over-large black" (284). |
|
2332 | Brother Miller |
"Brother Miller" leads the adult men's Bible study class at the Protestant church that the narrator of "Uncle Willy" attends (227). In his case, "Brother" is a ceremonial title, reflecting his place in the church fellowship. Willy reluctantly leaves the boys' class in Sunday school to sit in with the "men" (227). |
|
3424 | Brother J.C. Goodyhay |
A former "Marine sergeant" (295) who, after seeing a vision of Jesus during a battle in the Pacific, comes back to the U.S. to run a religious community out of his ramshackle house. His wife reportedly "ran off" with a salesman while Goodyhay was at war (294). He is described in The Mansion as "a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic strip Puritan" (293). |
|
1276 | Brother Fortinbride |
"Brother" Fortinbride is a character in two of The Unvanquished stories. A private in Sartoris' regiment, he was seriously wounded in battle at the start of the war. Invalided back to Yoknapatawpha, in "The Unvanquished" he helps Rosa distribute money and mules to the county's poor: although he is a farmer, and a Methodist, he officiates as a vernacular preacher in the services that Rosa Millard organizes in the Episcopal Church in the absence of the regular minister; his title "Brother" is an unofficial religious one. |
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3009 | Brother Bedenberry |
In Light in August, Bedenberry is preaching when Joe enters the Negro church and tries "to snatch him outen the pulpit" (323). |
|
325 | Bridger |
Briefly mentioned by name in "Vendee" and again in The Unvanquished, Bridger is one the men in Grumby's gang; he assists Matt Bowden in surrendering Grumby to Bayard and Ringo. |
|
3217 | Boys Named Remish |
According to the narrator of "By the People," the compact organs manufactured by "the Remish Musical Company of South Bend, Indiana," were so popular with the country folk in Frenchman's Bend that in time "boy children from that section were bearing into puberty and even manhood Remish as their Christian names" (87). The narrator of this story is not noticeably facetious, and Faulkner's country people in other stories name their children things like "Montgomery Ward," so there's no reason to think this is just a joke. |
|
2509 | Boyd Ballenbaugh |
In "Hand upon the Waters," Boyd Ballenbaugh is Tyler Ballenbaugh’s younger brother. After a brief career in Memphis, where he worked as a hired guard during an industrial dispute and then got involved in undisclosed but apparently criminal activities with a set of "associates," he returns to his brother's house in Yoknapatawpha to hide out (76). A drunkard and a braggart, he is hotheaded and violent. Because he resents having to work for his brother "about the farm" (76), he comes up with what he thinks will be a quick - and murderous - way to make money. |
|
729 | Boy Grier |
Unlike the upper-class boy narrators of Faulkner's previous fictions, the unnamed eight-year-old who narrates the three 'Grier' stories in the early 1940s - "Two Soldiers," "Shingles for the Lord" and "Shall Not Perish" - narrates from within the class of impoverished farmers who subsist on the poor land around Frenchman's Bend. His concerns are closely tied to his family - mother, father and brother Pete - but in the first and last of the stories Faulkner also uses him to represent his caste in a new context, the second World War. |
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252 | Boon Hogganbeck |
The character of Boon Hogganbeck is essentially the same in all seven of his appearances in the fiction, though in one of them ("The Bear") his name is Hoggenbeck, and his lineage changes in another. In every text he has an Indian grandmother, but when he first appears, in "Lion," she is a "Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land" (184). Beginning with his next appearance, in "The Old People," Faulkner lowers her rank: Boon's blood, the narrator says, "is not a chief's blood" (203). |
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765 | Bookwright's Daughter |
Never given a first name in "Tomorrow," this "country girl of seventeen" (90) falls for Buck Thorpe's swagger. Her father, referred to only as "Bookwright," apparently discover her during "the inevitable elopement at midnight" and shoots Buck (90). Her subsequent fate is not mentioned. |
|
764 | Bookwright |
This "solid, well-to-do farmer, husband and father" from Frenchman's Bend is Gavin Stevens' client in "Tomorrow" (90). There is no way to determine if he is Odum or Homer or Cal, or yet a different member of the Bookwright|Bookright family. This Bookwright turned himself in after shooting Buck Thorpe to keep him from eloping with his daughter; the story begins during his trial for that crime. |
|
324 | Booker T. Washington |
At the end of Intruder in the Dust Gavin mentions "Booker T. Washington" twice while talking to Lucas, contrasting the way Lucas did "what nobody expected you to" with how Washington "did only what everybody expected of him" (237). Gavin's meaning is extremely difficult to pin down. The historical Booker T. Washington was born into slavery but by the end of the 19th century was perhaps the best-known black leader in America. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, a prominent orator and an adviser to several U.S. |
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178 | Bobo Beauchamp |
In The Reivers, Bobo Beauchamp is "another motherless Beauchamp child whom Aunt Tennie raised" on the McCaslin place (223). The narrative says he is the grandson of Tennie's Jim (21) and the cousin of Lucas Beauchamp (chronologically, however, Tennie's Jim, having been born only about two decades before Bobo, should be his father). When "the call of the out-world became too much for him," Bobo moved from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis (223), where he worked as a groom for Mr. Van Tosch, the white man who owns the horse Coppermine (i.e. Lightning). |
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3007 | Bobbie Allen |
In Light in August, Bobbie comes from a brothel in Memphis to the railroad town where she works for Max and Mame, by day as a waitress "in a small, dingy, back street restaurant" and by night as a prostitute. She responds to the romantic advances of 18-year old Joe Christmas, even though "she would never see thirty again" (172). |
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3678 | Bob Legate |
One of the men who regularly join Major de Spain's hunting parties. He is identified in The Reivers only by the adjective "old" (20). His relationship to Will Legate, who appears in other texts and is also known as a hunter, is not explained. |
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3447 | Black Jack Pershing |
The man whom Strutterbuck refers to in The Mansion as "Black Jack" is John Joseph Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Force that went to Europe during the last year of World War I - or as Strutterbuck puts it, who went "to France to run the show over there" (84). Strutterbuck claims to know Pershing, but there is not the slightest chance he is telling the truth, about that or anything else. |
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3241 | Bishop 2 |
In The Town this unnamed Bishop "boy" is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He is identified as "the youngest Bishop," but the novel says nothing about the others in his family (222). (In The Mansion a man named Ephriam Bishop is the sheriff.) |
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1936 | Bishop 1 |
William Avery Bishop (1894-1956) led all Canadian aviators during World War I, being credited with shooting down 72 German planes. The captive German aviator of "Ad Astra" reports that one of his younger brothers, an ace pilot himself, "iss killed by your Bishop . . . that good man" (419). |
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3626 | Birdsongs |
In "Pantaloon in Black" as both a story and a chapter in Go Down, Moses, the man Rider kills belongs to the large Yoknapatawpha family of Birdsongs; the deputy sheriff tells his wife how large it is: "It's more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There's forty-two active votes in that connection" (148). As voters the men in the family have a lot of influence with the county sheriff, but it's clear from both what the deputy says and the events of the story that as a clan the Birdsongs aren't going to rely on the law to punish Rider for killing one of their own. |
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322 | Birdsong |
In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Birdsong is the white night-watchman at the mill whom Rider kills. For fifteen years he has run a crap game using "crooked dice" which allow him to cheat the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay. He is part of a large family clan; as the deputy sheriff says, "It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There’s forty-two active votes in that connection" (252, 148). Birdsong is repeatedly referred to in the narrative as "the white man" who carries a "heavy pistol in his hip pocket" (250-51, 145). |
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3705 | Birdie Watts |
Birdie Watts runs the brothel "across the street" from Miss Reba's in The Reivers (107). |
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867 | Binford |
This "Binford" (no first name) is one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who are courting Eula Varner in The Mansion. He is probably related to the Dewitt Binford who marries one of Flem's sisters. It's also possible but very unlikely that he is related to Lucius Binford, the man of the house in a Memphis brothel. |
|
2481 | Bill Terrel |
In "Monk" Bill Terrel is described as "a tall man, a huge man, with a dark aquiline face like an Indian's except for the pale yellow eyes and a shock of wild, black hair" who speaks in a "queer, high, singsong filled with that same abject arrogance" that characterizes his appearance (55). He convinces Monk to kill the Warden. He seems to serve as a foil for Monk - Terrel owns a gas station, and Monk works at one; he yearns for a pardon, and Monk refuses one; he trusts no one, and Monk trusts everyone. |
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235 | Bilbo Snopes |
Bilbo is a minor figure in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. In The Town he is the son of I.O. Snopes and his second wife and the twin to Vardaman Snopes. Not even that much is made clear when he is briefly mentioned inThe Mansion. He is named after Theodore G. Bilbo, a Mississippi Governor and U.S. Senator who was a staunch defender of white supremacy. |
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2898 | Bilbo Gowrie |
In Intruder in the Dust Bilbo Gowrie and his brother Vardaman are identical twins, "identical as two clothing store dummies" (159) or "two clothes pins on a line" (160). The novel consistently treats them identically too. "About thirty, a head taller than their father," their faces are "surly quick-tempered and calm" (160), though they act together with energy in the search for their murdered brother's body. |
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2889 | Big Top |
In The Town Big Top is Guster's husband and father to Aleck Sander and Little Top. Only his name appears in the narrative (55). |
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1972 | Bidwell |
In "Hair" Bidwell is the storekeeper in Division who has the key to the Starnes's house; he shows the narrator around it, and "opens the Bible" which records the mortgage payments Hawkshaw made (146). |
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3427 | Beth Holcomb |
In The Mansion Holcomb is a "thick but not fat and not old" woman who gives Mink chores around the house and points him in the direction of Brother Goodyhay (291). |
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53 | Benjamin Compson |
Benjy Compson is one of the most original characters in American literature. To Mrs. Compson, who originally named him Maury in honor of her brother, Benjy's severe mental handicap is shameful, and a reason to change his name to Benjamin - apparently on her son Quentin's suggestion, though tellingly he gets the Biblical significance of the name Benjamin wrong. |
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8 | Benbow Sartoris |
The country boy who narrates "Shall Not Perish" notes that Sartorises "still lived in our county" in 1942 (112). In the collected fictions, however, there is only one Sartoris left by that time, the son of Bayard Sartoris III and Narcissa Benbow who was born on the same day his father died in 1920, at the end of Flags in the Dust, and given his name as his mother's attempt to avoid the apparent curse on the various Bayards and Johns in the Sartoris line of succession. |
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2298 | Benbow Family |
In Flags in the Dust the Benbows are identified as one of the oldest and most prominent Yoknapatawpha families, though they do not figure among the county's large plantation owners, and individual members of that family play major roles in that novel, Sanctuary and "There Was a Queen." In "Skirmish at Sartoris," however, as a short story and again as a chapter in The Unvanquished,the family is mentioned only as the antebellum owners of a "carriage" and the slave - "Uncle Cash," or Cassius - who drove it (66). |
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743 | Ben Quick's Grandchild |
One of Ben Quick's grandchildren is mentioned in The Hamlet, although not identified as a boy or a girl. Ben has a son named Isham, but whether he is the father of this child is also not said. |
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321 | Ben Quick |
Ben Quick is an inhabitant of Frenchman's Bend, though he appears differently in the two texts that mention him. In The Hamlet he is the father of Lon, a "hale burly old man" (92) who raises goats on his farm. In "Tomorrow," he is the father of Isham, and the owner of the sawmill in Frenchman's Bend. |
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2860 | Ben Berry |
In "An Error in Chemistry" Ben Berry is a Deputy Sheriff. Sheriff Hub sends him to keep an eye on the Flints' house in case Joel Flint returns there after escaping from the local jail cell. He loses his "spectacles in the woods" during the pursuit, and so can't read an important clue to the killer's identity (123). |
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305 | Belle Worsham|Eunice Habersham |
Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later. |
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202 | Belle Mitchell Benbow |
In Flags in the Dust Belle is Harry Mitchell's wife and Horace Benbow's lover for most of the novel, though she is Mrs. Benbow at the end. With Harry she has a daughter, Little Belle. Her hair is described as a "rich bloody auburn" (199), and her personality in equally vivid if pejorative terms: "her eyes are like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent" (182). "Smoldering" is recurrent adjective for her (201, 203, etc.). Unlike the aristocratic Benbows, she is very much a citizen of the New South. |
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755 | Beck Burden |
She is one of three daughters of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline in Light in August. "Beck" is presumably short for Rebecca. Unlike their older brother Nathaniel, who is dark like their mother, all three daughters have blue eyes. |
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276 | Beauchamp, Grandchildren of Lucas |
These "grandchildren" of Lucas Beauchamp are mentioned only in the short story "A Point of Law," and the one reference to them there is ambiguous. "He had one daughter with grandchildren" (214) - this could mean that the grandchildren are his daughter's instead of his. No other details about them, or about Lucas' larger family, are given in this short story. (When Faulkner revised the story into the "Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses, the phrase "one daughter with grandchildren" was omitted.) |
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2733 | Beauchamp, Father of Hubert and Sophonsiba |
Sophonsiba only briefly mentions her father as she flirts with Buck McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. Ike, however, recalls the Beauchamp family line, and Hubert’s and Sophonsiba’s father in it, as he contemplates his inheritance (294). |
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2734 | Beauchamp, Ancestors of Hubert and Sophonsiba |
Thinking about his legacy in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to "the ones who sired the Beauchamp who sired Uncle Hubert and his Uncle Hubert's sister" (294). The locution is confusing, in part because "his Uncle Hubert's sister" is in fact Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, as one might expect him to acknowledge. And obviously "the ones who sired" doesn't imply two fathers, but a longer generation of 'sires,' who would include Ike's great-grandfather and earlier male ancestors. |
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319 | Beasley Kemp |
In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet Beasley Kemp is a neighboring farmer with whom Ab Snopes does a horse trade. |
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9 | Bayard Sartoris IV |
This is the only child of young Bayard's short-lived marriage to Caroline White. According to Jenny Du Pre, Caroline named him Bayard "nine months before it was born" (51). He and his mother both died while Bayard was in France, though Flags in the Dust does not explain the cause. |
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6 | Bayard Sartoris III |
Although this Bayard, the third on the Sartoris family tree, has a son, The Mansion, the second to last text Faulkner published, is not wrong to call this Bayard "the last Sartoris Mohican" (210). He appears or is mentioned in seven texts. |
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4 | Bayard Sartoris II |
This Bayard Sartoris, the second on the family tree, is the son of Colonel John. In many of the eighteen texts in which he appears he is often called "Colonel Sartoris" too, even though he never fought in any war. In the larger story of Yoknapatawpha he is a transitional figure between the heroic past, when his father fought Yankees and built railroads, and modernity. His greatest achievement is to establish a bank in Jefferson, though it ultimately ends up in the hands of a Snopes. |
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3 | Bayard Sartoris I |
This is the first of the four 'Bayards' on the Sartoris family tree. When Colonel John Sartoris' sister Virginia (Aunt Jenny) Du Pre comes to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina, she brings with her the story she loves to tell the younger members of her family about her bother Bayard's death in the Civil War. To her, at least, and in these stories, this Bayard is an incredibly romantic figure, likened to "Richard First . . . before he went crusading" (11). During the Civil War he is Gen. J.E.B. |
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282 | Barton Kohl |
According to Ratliff, the Greenwich Village sculptor who marries Linda Snopes is "not big, he jest looked big, like a football player" (190), and his "pale eyes" looked at you "missing nothing" (191). Several characters in The Mansion make it a point to mention that he is Jewish. Like so many of the southern men in the other fictions, however, Barton Kohl goes off to fight in a civil war - the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He is killed there while serving with the Loyalists. |
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2510 | Ballenbaugh, Family of Tyler |
Tyler Ballenbaugh's "family" is mentioned when he first appears in "Hand upon the Waters," but no other details about them are given (75). The fact that Tyler is "married," however, means the family includes a wife (75). |
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3653 | Ballenbaugh 2 |
Ballenbaugh's son, also known in The Reivers simply as "Ballenbaugh," is, like his father, a "giant" (73). He claims to have served the Confederacy during the Civil War as a "partisan ranger" in Arkansas, but the narrative casts that story in doubt, suggesting instead that he acquired the pile of "uncut United States bank notes" he returns with in 1865 by more illegal means (73). |
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3652 | Ballenbaugh 1 |
The first Ballenbaugh in Yoknapatawpha is as colorful as the place that bears his name. Described in The Reivers as an "ancestryless giant," he arrived in the county "from nowhere" and by some means - the narrative implies a coercive one - took over the store and ferry run by a man named Wylie (72). Under his ownership, the place became a "roaring" one: a "grubbing station and saloon" for the wagon-drivers who passed through on the way to or from Memphis (72). |
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2807 | Backhouse, Uncle of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard," Philip lists his Uncle, who ran unsuccessfully "for Governor of Tennessee" on what was obviously a pro-slavery platform, as one of the ancestors who have worn the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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2805 | Backhouse, Grandfather of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists this Grandfather, who fought on the colonial side with "Marion all through Carolina" during the American Revolution, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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2806 | Backhouse, Father of Philip |
In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682). |
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318 | Babe Ruth |
Mentioned in both The Sound and the Fury - where Jason Compson has a particular animus against him - and The Reivers George Herman "Babe" Ruth, Jr., played baseball for the New York Yankees from 1920-1934. During that time he was probably the most famous athlete in the U.S. |
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2732 | Aunt Thisbe |
When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the only reference to Thisbe in Go Down, Moses, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household. |
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1515 | Aunt Sally Wyatt |
Though the narrator of Flags in the Dust and both Benbows call her "Aunt Sally," there is no sign of any nieces or nephews (168). She is the neighbor and old family friend who stays with Narcissa while Horace is in France. The narrator calls her "a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her intelligence with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1901" (168). |
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2813 | Aunt Roxanne |
A slave belonging to the Compson family who is mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard." Despite her enslavement, she remains loyal to the Compsons during a moment of danger. |
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1928 | Aunt Rachel |
Aunt Rachel never directly appears in "That Evening Sun." Quentin says she is "old," and lives in a cabin "by herself" near Nancy, smoking "a pipe in the door, all day long" (294). The "Aunt" in her name is clearly conventional, part of the way the Jim Crow culture stereotypes Negroes, but it's not clear whether she is "Jesus' mother": "Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn't any kin to Jesus" (294). Quentin's father suggests Nancy could "go to Aunt Rachel's" for safety, but that doesn't happen (306). |
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2303 | Aunt Louisa |
In "That Will Be Fine," Aunt Louisa is married to Uncle Fred and mother to Louisa, Fred, and an unnamed baby. As Rodney's older sister, she repeatedly rationalizes her brother's behavior. She hides his misdoings from their father, and pleads for Mr. Pruitt to give him time to get the two thousand dollars he needs to cover his theft from the Compress Association. |
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3650 | Aunt Fittie |
In The Reivers Otis tells Lucius that Aunt Fittie, who took Corrie in after her mother's death, "might have been kin to some of us," but that isn't definite (153). She lives "in a house on the edge" a small town in Arkansas and prostitutes the "eleven or twelve" year-old Corrie to local men for fifty cents a visit (154). |